Even the dark
unbolting, even the ducks
at the edge of the river, even the dock
at the sea’s wide corner, the job lot
of my horseless valley, even the night I thought
my luck had run out, when I lived in England
then in an attic in Michigan, and I went to the motel
and back again, and I went to the motel
and back again, and the bell rang
and rang again, three times to make the bread change, and my friends moved to Berlin
and back again, my friends moved to Peckham
and Notting Hill, to Durham, North Carolina, and I lived on the lowest river, east of
Midsummer Common, with my friends and their dog, Monk, black
as the water that razed me and stronger, I moved back
to Boston, to Allston
and Brighton, my friends broke up, the dog had worms, I lived on the Quai de l’Oise, where I can’t return,
and bought Judoleine olives and savon d’alep from a Turk at the market
and sat in cafés and sipped Oranginas, and Joel was in Cambridge, minding
Eliza’s cat, who is disturbed, and I lived in a beautiful room in an Art Deco mansion
in Connecticut, I got sick, I couldn’t read, I followed a boy to Vienna, where Persian rugs hang at Brunnenmarkt,
Armenian maybe, and the Danube splits straight and snakelike, like a two-bodied snake
with just one head, like a possible snake
in an impossible vision, and the world is surveyed
by the great cathedral, which drove me mad, once, a man drove out into a field with Anne Sexton
and now I need to write him back, and there’s rules about what to read, first the Bible but then
the Franciscans, the Metaphysicals, the Romantics and then the Americans,
and I can’t bring myself to deny much of anything.
